Paradox
by CarmineDuvale
Summary: Tom Riddle may still be a blood-thirsty paradox, but Ginevra Weasley has learned to play his games. One-shot. Gin'n'Tonic. Written for the Gin'n'Tonic holiday challenge


She discovers the room when she's thirteen, back when none of them know anything about it, back when the place doesn't have to have majuscules attached to its name, back when it is just what it had always been intended to be _– a room to exist until it doesn't anymore._

She finds it.

 _(It finds her.)_

It's not that she is searching for something at that very moment, or, rather, it's not that her desire to find is greater than at any other time in any other day.

 _(Hasn't she been living with this for years, this apoplectic need pressing on her lungs, suffocating her brain, embracing her cells with a forceful insistence?_

 _Hasn't she been living with this for years, this paradoxical desperation for something she has no courage in her body to name?)_

But the door is there, all dark wood and worn handle, and she still has that dose of daring curiosity, the one you need to talk with strangers whose bones and blood are ink and paper, and _of course_ she opens it, the door, was there ever any doubt about that?

And the place, the room, _no majuscules yet,_ is beautiful and serene and, like all beautiful and serene places, it has that ghoul lurking in its depths. And Ginny is mesmerized.

As mesmerized as someone who had bled on the Chamber's floors can ever be again.

Still, though it may not appear so, Ginevra Weasley has learned.

She has learned that people don't like little girls following invisible threads to charming boys who slip into their soul and sip it like fine wine. She has learned that charming boys who slip into your soul and sip it like fine wine use little girls hard and don't particularly like them, either.

Ginevra Weasley has learned that, despite a castle full of people and despite seven _noble_ brothers, despite a personality so fiery she doesn't need matches for it to burst into flames, she has learned that she is a lonely little girl with dangerous wishes.

And she has learned to slip those wishes under rugs so thick no charming boys could sip them like fine wine.

So, of course, she feels the pull of the diadem that day.

But she knows, just like she knows all those other things she's learned, knows the way poets know they have no control over their poetry and the way biologists know how best to recite the twelve uses of Dragon Blood, knows that is not the day she's meant to find it.

So she turns back on her heels.

And leaves.

 _(Her time is coming._

 _And There Are No Minuscules For This Place Again.)_

* * *

By her fourth year, Ginny has accepted she's not as noble as she might like to think.

"I'm sorry, Gin," Harry mumbles. "I forgot."

She regards him coolly, detachedly, one eyebrow raised, lips pressed, a look she might not have been able to pull off before the diary.

Why is she forcing herself to help this idiot again?

"Lucky you," is all she says.

* * *

She fought it in the beginning, fought it so hard that she spent the entire summer before second year being the kind of good girl that would have made Tom Riddle's skin crawl.

The kind of good girl whose bones ache with goodness.

The kind of good girl who festers so hard on the inside she might lose it any moment.

 _(She ate everything on her plate and took the seconds offered and thanked her mother with kisses and without ever saying_ _ **Why aren't you looking me in the eyes?**_ _or_ _ **You can still not fail me.**_

 _She listened to her father's chirpings, muggles and muggle things and airy-fairy stuff that didn't belong in the same reality as his little girl and her little, shattered mind and smiled and nodded and cooed and never said_ _ **He was in my mind so deep I could feel his taste on my tongue**_ _._

 _She ran with her brothers like she did every summer and flew through the air and crawled through the mud and sang loudly during Percy's study time and let spiders loose in Ron's bedding and if she liked it less than any other time or if she enjoyed his screams more than before, she didn't let it show. She never said a curse word despite Fred and George's pestering, though it was stuck in her neck, the last word he had ever written in that diary, in his neat, perfect writing, charming like the rest of him.)_

When September rolled around, truths skirted the edges of Ginny's mind and she chased them away.

Her own skin crawled and her chapped lips curled around the roundness of the word and her room fell silent.

"Fuck."

* * *

She fought her second year to be noble. She did. But she was just a bitter little girl. And she missed him.

* * *

The Room, peaceful and quiet and full of ghouls, is like a cathedral of sin as she walks toward the diadem.

 _(As the diadem pulls her toward itself.)_

When the tiara touches her head, somewhere at the very beginning of her sixth year, while the Carrows amble down the corridors like plague in human form, she knows for the first second this Tom is different and better.

Darker.

Stronger.

Madder.

And more charming than ever.

The same as always, a lovely, blood-thirsty paradox who sweeps under the rugs and cuddles with her wishes.

 _Missed me, sweetheart?_ His thoughts, amused and cruel, tickle the edges of her mind.

But Ginevra Weasley has learned, you see. She has learned that charming boys who slip into your soul and sip it like fine wine never get drunk on you, but always on their power. She has learned she likes her power just as much, after these years of self-torment and ignorance, after _Don't trust things who don't show you where their brain is being kept_ and _Gin, what were you even thinking?_. After the year of helplessness that passed.

 _Make me queen, Tom,_ she says and he, alert at once, drunk on this woman-child who thought herself to play his games, would have smiled had he had a body.

 _Let's give them hell,_ he says.

 _(And pours his soul into a cup and lifts it to her lips.)_

* * *

 **I wrote this for the Gin'n'Tonic holiday challenge on** tumblr **and decided to post it here too. Mostly because I actually really love it and** I **so rarely love what I write. Please review. It takes a moment and makes me happy**


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